Twitter doubled its character limit to 280; gets mixed reaction

Many people pointed out that the increase is going to affect the beauty of the messages

No more scratching head for the words you missed while tweeting. Twitter has made it official that the microblogging platform has increased the character limit to 280, twice the earlier character limit.

The announcement about doubling the number of characters for tweets was made on Tuesday after the developers tested the feature for over a month.

According to the microblogging site, the higher character limit will increase the user engagement as more people are likely to tweet.

Since its inception in 2007, Twitter has fixed its character limit to 140 and this was basically to enable mobile phone users to post tweets as SMS, which has a character limit of 160.

But the brevity of tweets became its hallmark and beautifully crafted messages were sent across, making a paradigm shift from the lengthy blog posts that were prevalent till then; therefore, making it a corner for complex discussions.

The current increase in character limit is only applicable to English as Twitter said on Tuesday that English could not pack much information under 140 characters unlike other languages such as Chinese, Japanese or Korean that has characters that denote whole words.

After Twitter made the announcement about the increase in character limit, many people pointed out that the increase is going to affect the beauty of the messages and they complain 280 characters are too much.

Twitter’s Chief Executive Jack Dorsey on Tuesday announcing the new change tweeted a long tweet, striking off a few characters to fit Twitter’s earlier limit of 140 characters.

Twitter doubled its character limit to 280; gets mixed reaction was last modified: November 9th, 2017 by AB Wire